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Hello! Happy to answer any questions you have about 18F. The basics: we're an office of federal employees inside the General Services Administration that helps other federal agencies improve how they build, buy, and share technology. Other agencies have to pay us for our work, so we operate in a similar way to a private business. You can see a summary of the types of things we ship (with examples) here https://18f.gsa.gov/what-we-deliver/. More info about the micro-purchase platform here https://18f.gsa.gov/tags/micro-purchase-platforms/

*I'm an 18F employee.

discuss

softwarelimits|9 years ago

Thanks for your answer!

I am just looking at this from the viewpoint of an interested citizen (in Europe) and try to compare with how things work here. Currently I suspect we are heavily missing something like 18F.

Do you know what brought 18F into existence? Was this an administrative initiative? Was there big resistence to start that? I am interested in some of the "meta" behind how all that happened.

Also: are there some laws involved?

I guess I could contact your press office, however, maybe you would like to post some interesting links to stories that certainly went unnoticed on the other side of the ocean.

Things like 18F show a very interesting aspect of USA that does not fit into the usual "ultra-capitalist" stereotypes that are painted in the european media much too often. Especially the commitment to OS is extraordinary interesting!

Thanks for your attention!

andrefrancisco|9 years ago

18F came out of the Presidential Innovation Fellowship (pif.gov) when some fellows wanted to stick around and continue their public service. So they created 18F as a more permanent home that could house larger projects and hire people for longer tours of duty. It's a sister office to the U.S. Digital Service (which is in the White House) but it's primarily a GSA initiative.

There aren't specific laws involved. We aren't funded by Congress, but instead by an investment from GSA and fees from our partner agencies.

Here's one of the larger stories about the digital services movement in the U.S., including the U.S. Digital Service and 18F. https://www.fastcompany.com/3046756/obama-and-his-geeks

We've taken heavy influence from the GDS team in the UK, and Estonia is also a leader in digital government. https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/06/17/what-estonia-can-teach-us-abo...